After Fox News’s years of misinformation, propaganda, and general service as right-wing state TV, some of the network’s talking heads are, at long last, growing consciences. Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, a journalist and former editor of neocon bible The Weekly Standard, announced on Sunday that they had resigned as paid Fox News contributors in protest over Tucker Carlson’s three-part Patriot Purge series, about the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“The special—which ran on Fox’s subscription streaming service earlier this month and was promoted on Fox News—is presented in the style of an exposé, a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism,” Goldberg and Hayes wrote in a post on The Dispatch, the “fact-based” conservative politics and culture site they co-founded in 2019. (The fact that they have to brand it as such is a sign of just how closely conservative news has become associated with misinformation.) However, Goldberg and Hayes continued, Patriot Purge is actually “a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.” Both Goldberg and Hayes told The New York Times that they believed the special—which portrays so-called patriotic Americans as being under siege by the government—could lead to more violence.
They’re not the only ones waking up to Fox News’s toxic bleed. Representative Liz Cheney is among the Republicans who voiced support for Hayes and Goldberg, thanking them via Twitter on Sunday for “standing up for truth and calling out dangerous lies.” Last month, Carlson’s Fox News colleague Geraldo Rivera also condemned Patriot Purge’s conspiracy theorizing as “bullshit.” After issuing the disclaimer that Carlson is “wonderful” and “provocative,” Rivera elaborated in a subsequent interview with the Times: “There are some things that you say that are more inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated. And I worry that—and I’m probably going to get in trouble for this—but I’m wondering how much is done to provoke, rather than illuminate.” Regarding the insurrection, “the record, to me, is pretty damn clear,” Rivera said, “that there was a riot that was incited and encouraged and unleashed by Donald Trump.”
Some might say better late than never, though I wouldn’t be one of them. I’m getting definite Stephanie Grisham vibes from Fox News’s latest waves of critiques from within. Frankly, Fox News has been potentially violence inciting for quite some time now, and given the arc of the Trump presidency, it shouldn’t take a Carlson series—or indeed the insurrection itself—to see it. Still, Goldberg and Hayes’s resignations send a clear message: You know that things are bad at Fox News when its own people are disgusted.
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